Inpress Newsletter
Stephen Derwent Partington, Cinnamon Press author of How to Euthanise a Cactus, writes about Sudan’s Bashir in Kenya, and writing against injustice.
What happens if, to the ceremony to promulgate your country’s new Constitution, you invite a President for whom the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant, particularly if you’re a signatory to the Rome Statute that makes it obligatory for you to arrest such a person, and then you don’t? Further, if one of the key clauses of the new Constitution you’re at that moment implementing so that we can enjoy a ‘New Kenya’ states quite clearly that international law(s) to which your country is a signatory will form part of the Constitution?
Hmmm. For the more politically-blind postmodernists out there, it’s a fun paradox, the mere play of texts, in this case The Foundational text, the Constitution, alongside the ICC law. For us here in Kenya it’s more concerning, especially since we are as a populace waiting for the day when the ICC, as it says it will, issues arrest warrants for those Big Men identified by former UN General Secretary Kofi Annan as being complicit in our recent post-election violence, which saw up to two thousand killed and hundreds of thousands displaced. There is a worry that justice will not be done. We sat Kofi Annan three seats behind Bashir. Many of us also feel that the new Constitution and the so-called Second Republic has already, as a consequence, been treated with derision by the elites. And the future, which we cheered, now seems slightly less rosy.
Our responsibility as writers is now to hold the establishment to account: for this Bashir act, and at every step as the Constitution becomes fully implemented. We will retain the hope. I, for example, will continue to write the positive social and personal poems of the type that appear in How to Euthanise a Cactus, a collection dedicated to the displaced. But hope, like a cactus, has thorns; and hope, like even the hardiest cactus, can be euthanised.
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